A.N

by Jazmine Hughes

Earlier this week, Shonda Rhimes received The Hollywood Reporter Sherry Lansing Award, given to her for "in recognition of my breaking through the industry’s glass ceiling as a woman and an African-American." Here's part of her speech, published on Medium:

How many women had to hit that glass before the first crack appeared? How many cuts did they get, how many bruises? How hard did they have to hit the ceiling? How many women had to hit that glass to ripple it, to send out a thousand hairline fractures? How many women had to hit that glass before the pressure of their effort caused it to evolve from a thick pane of glass into just a thin sheet of splintered ice?

So that when it was my turn to run, it didn’t even look like a ceiling anymore. I mean, the wind was already whistling through — I could always feel it on my face. And there were all these holes giving me a perfect view to other side. I didn’t even notice the gravity, I think it had worn itself away. So I didn’t have to fight as hard, I had time to study the cracks. I had time to decide where the air felt the rarest, where the wind was the coolest, where the view was the most soaring. I picked my spot in the glass and called it my target. And I ran. And when I hit finally that ceiling, it just exploded into dust.

Like that.
My sisters who went before me had already handled it.

A couple of weeks ago, I was working a red carpet event for a freelance job and one of the questions I had to ask was "What's your favorite Shonda Rhimes moment?" The answer, from now on, is this one.

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When a child sees a parent die, experiences severe poverty, or witnesses neighborhood violence, it can leave a permanent mark on her brain. This type of unmitigated, long-term "toxic stress" can affect a person's cardiovascular health, immune system, and mental health into adulthood.

“If you have a whole bunch of bad experiences growing up, you set up your brain in such a way that it’s your expectation that that’s what life is about,” James Perrin, president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, told me recently.

A new study in the journal Health Affairs finds that nearly half of all children in the U.S. have experienced one such social or family-related trauma.

Here's how the report authors found that number, according to the release:

For the study, [Johns Hopkins University family-health professor Christina] Bethell and her colleagues analyzed data from the 2011-12 National Survey of Children's Health, a survey of parents of 95,677 children under 17 from throughout the United States. The survey included questions about nine adverse childhood experiences as reported by parents: extreme economic hardship, parental divorce/separation, lived with someone with a drug or alcohol problem, witness or victim of neighborhood violence, lived with someone who was mentally ill or suicidal, witnessed domestic violence, parent served time in jail, treated or judged unfairly due to race/ethnicity, and the death of a parent. The survey includes myriad data on family and neighborhood environments and parental well-being in addition to children's schooling and medical care, and contains some data about child resilience.

The study found that 48 percent of children have experienced one of these childhood traumas, and 23 percent experienced two or more. But kids in some states fared worse than others. New Jersey had the lowest percentage of children with two or more traumas, at 16 percent, while Oklahoma had the highest, at 33 percent. Here's a map showing the general ranking of the states:

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Percentage of Children Who Have Experienced at Least Two Traumas, Compared to the National Average

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Children exposed to at least two traumas were 2.5 times more likely to repeat a grade or to be disengaged with their classwork, compared to those who had no such experiences. They were also much more likely than the others to suffer from chronic health problems, such as asthma, ADHD, autism, and obesity.

This was true even after adjusting for race, income, and health status. Put another way, this means that even if a child is born into the best of circumstances, just two hyper-stressful events can send him on a downward development spiral.

Doctors and teachers can mitigate the negative effects of these experiences by providing kids with emotional support, the study authors note, as well as with "neurological repair methods, such as mindfulness training." The authors also recommend "trauma-informed" medical care for these children—a type of treatment that takes their turbulent home lives into account. For example, for a traumatized child between six and 17 years of age, it might be helpful to learn techniques such as "staying calm and in control when faced with a challenge."

That's good advice for any of us, but for nearly half of American children, it might be an essential, life-saving strategy.

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/12/half-of-all-kids-experience-traumatic-events/383630/

Conor Friedersdorf, Tanya Basu, Katie Kilkenny, and Lenika Cruz discuss the latest episode of WBEZ Chicago's popular non-fiction podcast Serial.

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Friedersdorf: In television, the penultimate episode of a season often packs in lots of plot advances while building to the climax of a story arc. But the second-to-last episode of Serial, "Rumors," is tangential to the story of Adnan Syed and the murder that he did or did not commit.

Has this podcast run out of steam?

Sarah Koenig makes much of a rumor that, as an eighth grader, Adnan stole money from the collection boxes at his mosque. Adnan subsequently admits he did steal, though he is frustrated that she's bringing up a shameful memory. What, he wonders, does that have to do with his case?

If there's a good answer, I don't know it.

Later in the episode, there's speculation with an expert witness who has interviewed a lot of killers about whether Adnan could be a psychopath, or could have convinced himself that he never committed a murder even after doing it, or could have done it without even realizing his crime.

None of the analysis that's offered goes very far toward providing solid answers. So why this particular aside?

Adnan's appearance at the end of the episode is the only part I found interesting. He writes Koenig a letter explaining that from the outset he’s endeavored to try to prove his case to her based on the facts. This is ostensibly a defense mechanism against people believing him to be untrustworthy. If he's being candid, there is a certain irony to his attempted approach. As a Redditor put it, "Charming guy charms reporter, later writes letter explaining he was trying to not be charming lest he be accused of trying to charm reporter."

It now seems overwhelmingly likely that Serial will end in ambiguity, though Adnan's story may well outlive it depending on whether or not the Innocence Project finds any useful evidence. I still have hopes that the last episode will be better than this week's effort–my least favorite, by far.

Are there redeeming qualities that I am missing?

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Basu: My immediate reaction to this week's episode? A yawn, I kid you not.

Perhaps the yawn was because of early-morning working hours. But probably it was also because of how boring this installment turned out to be. For an episode previewed last week with the provocative drop of the word “psychopath” and titled "Rumors," I had high expectations for something that was as riveting as last week's deft handling of white-reporter-privilege allegations and vivid profile of Cristina Gutierrez.

This week, Koenig focused on following up on rumors that hinted at a potential duplicitousness in Adnan's character. One rumor she mentions is unnamed besides hinting at something about Adnan that, if it were true, would implode the entire case and Koenig’s efforts. Koenig tracks down a guest of a long-ago party who allegedly started this rumor, drives several hours expecting the worst, and gets a blank stare in return.

The second rumor has more evidence behind it: Adnan and a small posse of young congregants stole money from Friday prayer donations at the local mosque frequently. The total amount ranges from being some chump change to thousands of dollars, but there are eyewitness accounts and verification from Adnan himself. However, Koenig asks, does being a thief a murderer make? Not necessarily, and Koenig spends the rest of the episode talking to a particularly bland criminal psychologist who verifies what we all sort of know: Murders of passion are often done in a blind rage. Those that commit such murders might not remember what they've done in the moment, and when confronted with evidence that they have, hurriedly try to cover it up. It takes an extreme emotional manipulator—and only here is the word psychopath correctly, clinically used—to murder and maintain innocence.

In terms of knowledge gleaned and narrative intrigue, this episode was a flat line of meh-ness.

As I pondered this episode, I realized something unsettling about myself, and perhaps every other Serial listener: I expected something sensational. As a journalist, I was a bit ashamed to come to this realization. The foundation of journalism, after all, is facts. As they say at J-school, "If your mother says she loves you, check it out." Koenig, in this respect, followed the proper protocol. She did the grunt work of following up on leads, she talked to experts, she explored every possible avenue of every lead, no matter how incredulous she was or how bombastic the accusation. She has been a relatively unbiased investigative journalist doing what she's supposed to, and here we get a glimpse of how unsexy and tedious research and fact-checking can be.

In a week that has resurfaced the Rolling Stone UVA story and condemnations of reporter Sabrina Rubin Erdely who appeared to fudge her handling of sexual-assault allegations, Koenig shows us that she’s a journalist, first and foremost. A story can be sensational by nature, and can be a source of intrigue, but in the end, there are real costs. There are humans involved, with emotions and livelihoods and reputations. It's a journalist's frighteningly awesome job to collect these stories and tell them without bias, insofar as that’s possible. We're reminded that this sometimes means a story entails just plain, dry facts.

What has made Serial essential water-cooler fodder has been its unpredictably meandering turns, its morally gray characters and compelling plot, its capability to appeal to what ultimately defines a good story: emotional investment. But what we have to remember is that facts, in the end, are a reporter’s priority even if they’re often tearfully boring.

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Kilkenny: In keeping with her recent habit of studying characters rather than the evidence involved in Hae's murder, this week Sarah turned her microscope on us. The listeners, or alternatively, the world—anyone who has ever perpetuated rumors and lent them credence. Sarah tries not to partake in that habit, instead using this episode to expose the errors in the rumors circulating about Adnan, even if the results aren’t exciting.

In the midst of it all we learn any one character trait is interpreted a thousand different ways by his acquaintances. Adnan tends to put people at ease, which one old friend remembers fondly: Adnan always made sure his less athletic buddy got picked for teams in gym class. Another interprets this same character trait to mean he was always deceptively looking for ways to defuse the “heat.” This is not a particularly thrilling revelation, but it also shows Serial at its best. For the time she’s tracking down rumors, Sarah Koenig is a dispassionate journalist superhero who substantiates and unsubstantiates all claims, no matter how ridiculous or seemingly inconsequential (a.k.a. stealing money at the mosque).

For that portion of the episode she is, as Adnan puts it so well, either his savior or his executioner.

But towards the end, Sarah becomes a sentimental storyteller. After he writes her a letter saying he wished the Serial scrutiny would stop, she expresses some misgivings about having exposed Adnan’s story, noting that she has been “stirring up the most painful possible questions about whether he’s a monster.” Sorry, Sarah, but that’s a journalistic cop-out. She’s backtracking, reverting to the fact that Rabia initially handed her the story, that she’s re-opening a case that makes a lot of people feel uncomfortable, most of all Adnan. We already know this stuff. As Conor noted, too, the letter contains some bullshit: Adnan hasn’t restrained himself from turning on the charm with her. Honestly, if that’s his 1% charm level, I shudder to think what maniacal villainous beneficence he could unleash at 100%.

Serial has become so important because it’s captivating viewers just as it severely complicates how we usually take our storytelling, even when it comes to true crime. So when Sarah pulls on the heartstrings for Adnan and implicates herself, I get angry. Sarah’s a reporter, she’s not beholden to the wishes of her source, who is a potential murderer who is talking to her willingly and is getting a lot of listeners, even fans, for it. We're not beholden to have the story end just because he wants it to. (Maybe, probably, I just don't want it to end.)

So here's my message for Sarah: Keep your backbone. As you go into the final episode, give us more of the savior-executioner. She's the one who's making Serial so great.

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Cruz: Let’s see if I can’t channel Adnan here and diffuse some of the heat in this conversation. So you all essentially agree that this episode was boring; you make a lot of reference to journalistic this and reporter that. Katie and Tanya were expecting something more sensational. Conor and Katie think Adnan was full of it when he said he didn’t want to manipulate Sarah, only to give her the facts.

OK. So, the facts. Yes, journalists are beholden to telling the truth as best they can, verifying leads here, checking out sources there. And yes, Sarah’s a journalist, and journalists tell stories. In some ways, it’s very kind of you to blame the alleged boring-ness of this latest episode on Sarah doing her duty to serve impartiality by any means. But journalists don’t just tell stories, because they’re true. Journalists do not traffic in fact-relaying or data distribution.

Journalists try to tell interesting stories! Often, journalists spend hours and hours of interviewing different sources to figure out if the story they want to tell is worth the time the audience puts in to paying attention. Every journalist, or writer for that matter, should try to answer the question: Why should anyone care? Why does this matter? Sarah told us in the first episode why she’s telling this story, and it’s not because there’s a point to telling Adnan’s story specifically: She picked this story because it came to her, almost literally landed on her desk. That’s it. That, and people started to listen.

If this were a truly journalistic endeavor, she would have checked out all the leads, gathered all her information ahead of time, and created a narrative with a beginning, middle, and end. She would have come to a conclusion; by now, no one is exactly expecting a real conclusion when next week’s final episode rolls around. In other words, if Serial were a purely journalistic effort, Adnan’s case probably wouldn’t have made for a good story. That’s not to say that what happened to him doesn’t matter, or that his case doesn’t have incredibly compelling elements, or that his situation doesn’t throw into sharp relief problems with the U.S. criminal justice system. But a major part of the appeal of Serial is the ability to follow along, to play detective alongside a journalist who is also playing detective (and savior, and executioner, and entertainer, and confidante, and so many other things).

If we strip away the snowballing, communal fascination, Serial is just Sarah telling a story without doing all the legwork ahead of time to figure out if there will a satisfying ending, a payoff in the traditional sense. If it fluctuates from exhilarating or boring from week to week, that's just the nature of this particular podcast. Exploiting Adnan and all the curious, ugly parts of his case was inevitable. Serial was destined to have to publicly work out the weird, ambiguous, unanswerable questions of the nature of knowledge, something that journalists rarely do. The nonlinear, jolting from subject to subject every week—also unavoidable.

I understand the urge to treat Serial like a TV show or a piece of pure reportage and arrange our expectations accordingly. But to do so is also unfair and misunderstands the limitations of the weird cross-genre space in which Serial lies. So if the season feels like it’s limping to the finish line, it’s doing so for the same reasons that made Serial so appealing in the first place.

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2014/12/serial-episode-11-sarah-koenig-savior-or-executioner/383656/

It wasn't until her death, in 1886, that the true scale of Emily Dickinson's profound poetry was both discovered and appreciated by family and friends, many of whom had only glimpsed her talents in the numerous poem-filled letters that she wrote. She found an even wider audience in 1890 with the posthumous publication of a volume of her work; a collection of her letters followed in 1894. Her most frequent correspondent, and a person now thought to have been the inspiration for much of her passionate material, was close friend (and, from 1856 onwards, sister-in-law) Susan Huntington Gilbert, a lady who provoked some undeniably intimate and romantic letters from the poet, the intensity of which to this day generate speculation about their relationship.

(Image: Death and Taxes.)

11 June 1852

I have but one thought, Susie, this afternoon of June, and that of you, and I have one prayer, only; dear Susie, that is for you. That you and I in hand as we e'en do in heart, might ramble away as children, among the woods and fields, and forget these many years, and these sorrowing cares, and each become a child again — I would it were so, Susie, and when I look around me and find myself alone, I sigh for you again; little sigh, and vain sigh, which will not bring you home.

I need you more and more, and the great world grows wider, and dear ones fewer and fewer, every day that you stay away — I miss my biggest heart; my own goes wandering round, and calls for Susie — Friends are too dear to sunder, Oh they are far too few, and how soon they will go away where you and I cannot find them, dont let us forget these things, for their remembrance now will save us many an anguish when it is too late to love them! Susie, forgive me Darling, for every word I say — my heart is full of you, none other than you in my thoughts, yet when I seek to say to you something not for the world, words fail me. If you were here — and Oh that you were, my Susie, we need not talk at all, our eyes would whisper for us, and your hand fast in mine, we would not ask for language — I try to bring you nearer, I chase the weeks away till they are quite departed, and fancy you have come, and I am on my way through the green lane to meet you, and my heart goes scampering so, that I have much ado to bring it back again, and learn it to be patient, till that dear Susie comes. Three weeks — they cant last always, for surely they must go with their little brothers and sisters to their long home in the west!

I shall grow more and more impatient until that dear day comes, for till now, I have only mourned for you; now I begin to hope for you.

Dear Susie, I have tried hard to think what you would love, of something I might send you — I at last saw my little Violets, they begged me to let them go, so here they are — and with them as Instructor, a bit of knightly grass, who also begged the favor to accompany them — they are but small, Susie, and I fear not fragrant now, but they will speak to you of warm hearts at home, and of the something faithful which “never slumbers nor sleeps” — Keep them 'neath your pillow, Susie, they will make you dream of blue-skies, and home, and the “blessed contrie”! You and I will have an hour with “Edward” and “Ellen Middleton”, sometime when you get home — we must find out if some things contained therein are true, and if they are, what you and me are coming to!

Now, farewell, Susie, and Vinnie sends her love, and mother her's, and I add a kiss, shyly, lest there is somebody there! Dont let them see, will you Susie?

Emilie —

Why cant I be the delegate to the great Whig Convention? — dont I know all about Daniel Webster, and the Tariff, and the Law? Then, Susie I could see you, during a pause in the session — but I dont like this country at all, and I shant stay here any longer! “Delenda est” America, Massachusetts and all!

open me carefully

It's difficult to overstate my love for this wonderful letter of thanks, written in 1982 by the late Jack Lemmon. It was sent to friend and fellow actor, Burt Reynolds, in response to a donation made to the Jack Lemmon Burn Center—one can only hope that Lemmon thanked all donors in a similarly amusing manner.

This precious letter is currently being sold at auction.

Transcript follows.

(Source: Julien's Auctions. Images above via Alan Light and Wikipedia.)



Transcripts

JACK LEMMON

June 7, 1982

Dear Person:

It has come to my attention that you sent a contribution of $10,000 to the Jack Lemmon Burn Center in the Children's Hospital of Buffalo.

I just wanted to say that I'm sorry that you couldn't come up with a sizable contribution, but God knows after all these years I, as much as anyone, understand the ups and downs of this crazy business. Some years are good, some years are bad, and even though you're obviously on the shit list, I certainly appreciate the fact that you made some kind of effort no matter how meager.

I do think it is important for me to clarify an area of possible confusion on your part. Burn Centre has nothing to do with critical reaction to your work. However, it's too fucking late so we're going to keep the money and help a hell of a lot of kids.

One of these days I'm going to work with you even if it kills me (and it probably will).

Many thanks, and love,

(Signed)

JL:bk

cc: Lee B. Winkler

After the Senate released its torture report, Michael Hayden, who formerly led both the CIA and the NSA, granted an interview to NBC News. Under questioning by Brian Williams, he provided no persuasive rebuttal to the report's findings. But he did offer a defense of America's intelligence community that doubles as an unwitting indictment of the country's leadership in the post-9/11 era. Here's what Hayden said as if it reflects well on the people who were in charge:

I was in government for ten years after 9/11, and let me tell ya, a phrase I never heard from anybody in any position of authority: 'Whatever you guys do about this terrorism threat, please, please don't overreact.' Never heard it, Brian.  

Like so much of what Hayden says, this is factually false. Members of Congress were in a position of Constitutional authority, and some pleaded with the Bush Administration to avoid overreacting to 9/11, as Russ Feingold and Barbara Lee can attest. But let's suppose Hayden was speaking of executive branch authority figures, in accordance with the dangerous but common view that the executive is all powerful in emergencies. It's believable that neither George W. Bush nor Dick Cheney nor Don Rumsfeld warned bureaucrats beneath them against overreacting to the terror threat.

What's staggering is that Hayden still hasn't figured out what a catastrophic misstep that was. Overreacting to the terrorist threat caused the U.S. to launch a war of choice against Iraq that killed thousands more Americans than Osama Bin Laden did at a cost expected to reach $6 trillion, plus thousands of lost limbs and PTSD cases.  Overreacting to terrorism caused intrusive ethnic profiling of New York City Muslims that led to zero terrorism leads and intrusive surveillance on the phone calls of American citizens that stopped zero terror plots.

One needn't be a particularly sophisticated student of terrorist-group tactics to understand that a superpower can harm itself more by overreacting than by doing too little. As David Kilcullen told Jim Fallows, "It’s al-Qaeda plus our response that creates the existential danger.” But if Hayden is to be believed, no one in a position of authority ever warned him to be wary of going too far, and he apparently lacked the prudence and foresight to guard against such excesses for himself.

Many American officials performed no better. Thus the world we live in today.

With one successful plot that killed 3,000 people, Osama Bin Laden baited America's ruling class into multiple foreign invasions, significant abrogations of civil liberties, and a loss of moral high ground as the world gazed in horror at our descent into torture. Yet an experienced intel official still finds it absurd to think he should've taken more care not to overreact. His heuristics are a poor guide to reality.

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/12/michael-hayden-no-one-ever-told-the-cia-or-the-nsa-to-avoid-overreacting/383601/

Spoilers ahead.

"If it's in a word, or it's in a look, you can't get rid of the Babadook."

So begins a mysterious children's pop-up book filled with eerie white charcoal drawings of an overcoated, Slenderman-like figure. The book and the spooky creature inside are ostensibly the big marketing hooks for the independent Australian psychohorror-meets-monster-story The Babadook, which debuted at Sundance earlier this year, months before a quiet Nov. 28 release in select U.S. theaters and VOD.

Promotional materials for horror films often try to tell audiences what kind of scary movie to expect. Is it a creepy doll movie? A haunted object movie? Freaky body horror? Possession movie? Another Paranormal Activity sequel? And so The Babadook got billed according to its most salient horror element: the monster.

Those lucky enough to have already seen the movie, which the director of The Exorcist called the most terrifying film he'd ever seen, quickly realized it wasn't quite about the titular boogeyman itself, nor was it about his evil book-vessel that haunts Amelia and her son Sam, whose father was killed in a car crash while driving his pregnant wife to the hospital to deliver him. Many reviews noted how the film gave form and voice to the unspoken horrors and pains of parenting, specifically motherhood, through the metaphor of an insanity-inducing demon.

First-time feature director Jennifer Kent admitted as much to Rolling Stone, saying "It really was connecting to that woman and her journey towards staring something nightmarish in the face. As the film progresses, you start to realize: Oh my God, the kid was right—and that's where the fear is for me."

But motherhood is inextricably tied in with childhood—there's the one doing the mothering and the one being mothered. And yet it's easier to focus on Essie Davis's increasingly wild-eyed, unhinged widow as the protagonist and the monster as a manifestation of her own unspoken grief than it is to focus on the trauma of her son, played with measured brilliance by Noah Wiseman.

Perhaps that's because Sam's behavior early in the film is the kind that could make for an effective birth-control ad campaign. Sam brings homemade weapons to school, obliviously tells uncomfortable strangers about the sad tale of his birth, throws poltergeist-like tantrums, pushes little girls out of tree houses, and worst of all, won't let his poor mother sleep. As the Boston Globe notes, "It’s tough at times to decide who’s the worse nightmare, 6-year-old Sam or...the Babadook. "

Part of this is just Sam being a kid. But it also turns out that his more maddening and arguably disturbing traits—the anger, anxiety-induced seizures, screaming, and risk-taking—fit the behavioral profile of a traumatized boy, according to the National Child Traumatic Stress Network. Look past the horror trope of the Satanic or disturbed little boy seen in The Omen, The Ring, and The Sixth Sense, and you'll find a child struggling to deal with the loss of a father he never knew, and Amelia's subsequent, deeply buried resentment toward him—in a completely normal way.

As Amelia succumbs to her madness—a harrowing blend of insomnia and cabin fever—Sam seems to grow more innocent. He's hungry. He's tired. He's scared. And even as Amelia withdraws, turning more violent, Sam is keen enough to understand that the woman who's screaming slurs at him and neglecting him isn't really his mother. She ignored his pleas ("Don't let it in! Don't let it in! Don't let it in!"), but it's still clear that when he told his mother "I promise to protect you if you promise to protect me," he meant it. He saved her, ultimately, with a soft touch on the cheek as she attempted to strangle him. In other words, with his intuitive, stubborn love. (Indeed, personal growth is a frequent result of loss for children).

The film is reminiscent of the 30-minute short film The Grandmother by David Lynch, whom Kent has cited as an influence (the auteur's has a singular approach to horror). Like The Babadook, the title of Lynch's 1970 film is just misdirection; the story isn't about the "grandmother," but the young boy who yearns for her as a source of affection. Lynch's mostly dialogue-free film delves into the twisted psyche of a disturbed, but ultimately sympathetic child who retreats into fantasy as a way to survive (even if his ending isn't quite as hopeful as Kent's).

The Babadook isn’t a tool to help children cope with grief (there are plenty of other films better up to the task), but the film does a sensitive job of portraying the special and confusing way children handle bereavement, and the way exasperated adults often misinterpret and obstruct that process.

The film has a solid grasp on the mutable, but ever-present pain of loss. The Babadook is particularly special for allowing its monster to live, even if it's locked in the basement, acknowledging that Sam and Amelia's shared darkness isn't a parasite to be eradicated. Amelia eventually learns that she can't fully insulate her son from her sadness; but she slowly allows him to recover in his own way, by having a birthday party, by collecting a can of worms to feed the new family member trapped downstairs. Turns out the book was right all along: You can't get rid of the Babadook, but you can at least learn to live with him.

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2014/12/what-the-hellish-babadook-has-to-say-about-childhood-grief/383528/

When it comes to buying gifts for children, everything is color-coded: Rigid boundaries segregate brawny blue action figures from pretty pink princesses, and most assume that this is how it’s always been. But in fact, the princess role that’s ubiquitous in girls’ toys today was exceedingly rare prior to the 1990s—and the marketing of toys is more gendered now than even 50 years ago, when gender discrimination and sexism were the norm.

In my research on toy advertisements, I found that even when gendered marketing was most pronounced in the 20th century, roughly half of toys were still being advertised in a gender-neutral manner. This is a stark difference from what we see today, as businesses categorize toys in a way that more narrowly forces kids into boxes. For example, a recent study by sociologists Carol Auster and Claire Mansbach found that all toys sold on the Disney Store’s website were explicitly categorized as being “for boys” or “for girls”—there was no “for boys and girls” option, even though a handful of toys could be found on both lists.  

That is not to say that toys of the past weren’t deeply infused with gender stereotypes. Toys for girls from the 1920s to the 1960s focused heavily on domesticity and nurturing. For example, a 1925 Sears ad for a toy broom-and-mop set proclaimed: “Mothers! Here is a real practical toy for little girls. Every little girl likes to play house, to sweep, and to do mother’s work for her":

Such toys were clearly designed to prepare young girls to a life of homemaking, and domestic tasks were portrayed as innately enjoyable for women. Ads like this were still common, though less prevalent, into the 1960s—a budding housewife would have felt right at home with the toys to “delight the little homemaker” in the 1965 Sears Wishbook:

While girls’ toys focused on domesticity, toys for boys from the '20s through the '60s emphasized preparation for working in the industrial economy. For example, a 1925 Sears ad for an Erector Set stated, “Every boy likes to tinker around and try to build things. With an Erector Set he can satisfy this inclination and gain mental development without apparent effort. … He will learn the fundamentals of engineering”:

However, gender-coded toy advertisements like these declined markedly in the early 1970s. By then, there were many more women in the labor force and, after the Baby Boom, marriage and fertility rates had dropped. In the wake of those demographic shifts and at the height of feminism's second-wave, playing upon gender stereotypes to sell toys had become a risky strategy. In the Sears catalog ads from 1975, less than 2 percent of toys were explicitly marketed to either boys or girls. More importantly, there were many ads in the ‘70s that actively challenged gender stereotypes—boys were shown playing with domestic toys and girls were shown building and enacting stereotypically masculine roles such as doctor, carpenter, and scientist:

Although gender inequality in the adult world continued to diminish between the 1970s and 1990s, the de-gendering trend in toys was short-lived. In 1984, the deregulation of children’s television programming suddenly freed toy companies to create program-length advertisements for their products, and gender became an increasingly important differentiator of these shows and the toys advertised alongside them. During the 1980s, gender-neutral advertising receded, and by 1995, gendered toys made up roughly half of the Sears catalog’s offerings—the same proportion as during the interwar years.

However, late-century marketing relied less on explicit sexism and more on implicit gender cues, such as color, and new fantasy-based gender roles like the beautiful princess or the muscle-bound action hero. These roles were still built upon regressive gender stereotypes—they portrayed a powerful, skill-oriented masculinity and a passive, relational femininity—that were obscured with bright new packaging. In essence, the "little homemaker" of the 1950s had become the "little princess" we see today.

It doesn’t have to be this way. While gender is what’s traditionally used to sort target markets, the toy industry (which is largely run by men) could categorize its customers in a number of other ways—in terms of age and interest, for example. (This could arguably broaden the consumer base.) However, the reliance on gender categorization comes from the top: I found no evidence that the trends of the past 40 years are the result of consumer demand. That said, the late-20th-century increase in the percentage of Americans who believe in gender differences suggests that the public wasn’t exactly rejecting gendered toys, either.

While the second-wave feminist movement challenged the tenets of gender difference, the social policies to create a level playing field were never realized and a cultural backlash towards feminism began to gain momentum in the 1980s. In this context, the model outlined in Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus—which implied that women gravitated toward certain roles not because of oppression but because of some innate preference—took hold. This new tale of gender difference, which emphasizes freedom and choice, has been woven deeply into the fabric of contemporary childhood. The reformulated story does not fundamentally challenge gender stereotypes; it merely repackages them to make them more palatable in a “post-feminist” era. Girls can be anything—as long as it’s passive and beauty-focused.

Many who embrace the new status quo in toys claim that gender-neutrality would be synonymous with taking away choice, in essence forcing children to become androgynous automatons who can only play with boring tan objects.  However, as the bright palette and diverse themes found among toys from the ‘70s demonstrates, decoupling them from gender actually widens the range of options available. It opens up the possibility that children can explore and develop their diverse interests and skills, unconstrained by the dictates of gender stereotypes. And ultimately, isn’t that what we want for them?

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/12/toys-are-more-divided-by-gender-now-than-they-were-50-years-ago/383556/

Our submitter says she spotted this request during a walk around her neighborhood in Oakland, California.

related: How not to solve your stray cat problem

Paul Gilmartin can spot his listeners well before they introduce themselves to him. They look like they want to cry, and their first words are usually something along the lines of "I just want to say ..." Gilmartin immediately hugs them, and the conversation that follows is far from anything two people who just met would ordinarily hold.

Gilmartin, 51, is the creator and host of The Mental-Illness Happy Hour, a weekly two-hour trudge to the darkest—and most joyful—corners of the human condition. He records the podcast in his hometown of Los Angeles, and the show is built around interviews with celebrities, artists, therapists, and podcast listeners; anonymous surveys; and Gilmartin's narration of his own struggles with depression, addiction, and overcoming sexual abuse. Thirty-five thousand people download the podcast each week, and some episodes—interviews he's held with Marc Maron, Maria Bamford, and Adam Carolla, for example—have been downloaded more than 80,000 times. The Mental-Illness Happy Hour website is home to an active listener forum, and the show's 200th episode aired on November 21.

The podcast serves as a place of community and affirmation for those who struggle with mental illness, including Gilmartin, who has been undergoing treatment for clinical depression since 1999 and has gained clarity on his own issues through talking with his guests and corresponding with his listeners. It was while interviewing comedian Danielle Koenig during episode 16 of the podcast that Gilmartin realized on-air that he had been molested by a neighbor as a young boy, and the revelation that he was a survivor of incest began its slow simmer while talking with radio personality Phil Hendrie on episode 59.

"We kind of compared notes and had the same creepy mom that had no boundaries," Gilmartin said in a Skype interview from the Dubuque Food and Wine Festival in Iowa in early November, where he was emceeing the event and serving as grand marshal of the festival's parade from a horse and buggy.

Ironically enough, Gilmartin has been sober since 2003, but prior to that, he read about wine all the time and kept his bottles in a temperature-controlled locker. “I drank wine every single night,” he said. “I didn't think I was an alcoholic. I just thought I was classy.”

Though his career has shifted almost entirely towards the world of mental health, Gilmartin remains well-known for his successes in the world of stand-up comedy and entertainment. He began performing stand-up in 1987, hosted TBS' Dinner and a Movie from 1995 to 2011, and has done the rounds at the Montreal and Aspen Comedy Festivals. You can still find his performances on YouTube and The Adam Carolla Show as the faux Congressman Richard Martin, a Republican from Ohio who believes religious extremism can be "crushed with God's help." Levity and humor also keep the podcast from being overwhelmingly heavy, and listeners can expect a dick joke every now and again, in between tales of binge eating, drug dealing and coping mechanisms.

"[Dr. Zucker] started pulling things out of me and walking me through it, and it was just like a dam broke," Gilmartin said. "By the time I posted the episode it was clear, and I cut contact with my mom." During episode 58 (recorded after the interview with Hendrie but aired beforehand), Gilmartin confronted the truth about his relationship with his mother for the first time: He had been a victim of incest. He was speaking with Dr. Jessica Zucker, a clinical psychologist who specializes in women's health, and about halfway through their conversation, Gilmartin's mother came up, along with her habit of grabbing his butt until he was in his mid-20s.

Gilmartin is all about getting into the grit, and this is why so many people listen to his podcast, take his surveys, pour their hearts out to him in emails, and walk up to him to say thank you, eyes full of mist. All psychiatric disorders are discussed and treated with empathy on The Mental-Illness Happy Hour, simply because Gilmartin feels that the more people can talk about their issues, the less others will be hurt by them. And perhaps people are genuinely curious about the inner workings of the unwell mind—Gilmartin's interview with Dr. David Hirohama, a counselor who worked with rapists and child molesters at Coalinga State Hospital in California, was the third most-listened to episode of 2013.

"We're all so related in so many ways," Gilmartin said. "Everybody has a dark side and a light side. And I'd like to think that the podcast is a really safe place to talk about their dark side, because there aren't many places that we can do that."

Gilmartin has put feelers out for interviews with serial killers, pedophiles, and rapists in efforts to push the limits of our understanding of one another, no matter our thoughts or actions. However, he says he won't interview someone who is planning on hurting someone, nor will he interview someone if he feels it's the wrong time—if they're in the midst of a breakdown or a relapse, for example. This, Gilmartin says, would be exploitative.

Between the hundreds of interviews he's conducted, the thousands of listener surveys he reads, and the extensive email correspondence he maintains with his listeners, Gilmartin finds that depression and anxiety are the most common ailments suffered. In fact, it was Gilmartin's own depression—or rather his emergence from it—that inspired him to create The Mental-Illness Happy Hour podcast in the first place. It was the holiday season of 2010, five months after he had stopped taking Wellbutrin, Celexa, and BuSpar for depression and anxiety, and darkness had descended over his life in a seemingly permanent way.

"When I realized, 'Oh my god, this is the depression!' I went back on my meds and within three, four days was feeling fine," he said. "I was like, 'I have to talk about this. I have to get the word out there.' Because I've been in therapy for years; I've been [going] to support groups for years; I've been seeing a psychiatrist for years, and I was [still] fooled by it. I thought about all the people who have never had any of those things, and what they're up against—thinking that [depression] is reality."

The first episode of The Mental-Illness Happy Hour aired in March of 2011, and it featured an interview with Janet Varney, Gilmartin's former co-host on Dinner and a Movie. She, too, suffered from depression and anxiety, as well as panic attacks and a habit for soothing herself with sugar.

The Mental-Illness Happy Hour now serves as Gilmartin's full-time job, though not one that pays very well. Between listener donations, podcast advertisers, and speaking gigs, he makes the equivalent of what would be a minimum-wage job—but according to Gilmartin, it's the greatest minimum-wage job you could ever imagine having. His wife works as a sitcom writer and takes care of most of the bills, allowing him to keep the podcast free for whoever needs it. Gilmartin says he also gets more fulfillment from producing the show than he ever did while making a name and money for himself in the world of entertainment.

"I don't come to this out of a sense of altruism," he said. "Maybe I started it because I thought I'd be good at it and it would help people. But I wouldn't be doing it three years later if I wasn't comforted by it. And I love that people say it helps them. I love it, love it, love it."

The Mental-Illness Happy Hour is not all healing tears and recovery breakthroughs. Gilmartin wades through people's gnarliest thoughts, compulsions, and confessions day in and day out, and he sometimes gets triggered and overwhelmed by the volume and intensity of it all. He can only get through between 10 and 20 responses to his abuse-focused "Shame and Secrets" survey in a sitting due to their heaviness, and he currently has a backlog of about 100 responses to sort through before he reads them on the air.

"Sometimes the best I can do is to say, 'I'm so sorry you're feeling that way, I'm so sorry this happened to you," Gilmartin said, describing how he handles the heaviest emails. "'That must be really hard. I want to encourage you to go talk to someone who's qualified because this is too much. This is over my head.'"

As Gilmartin nears his fourth year of producing The Mental-Illness Happy Hour, he's looking to get another idea off the ground, one that could provide instant solace to those in need: an app, similar to Twitter or Tinder, that would allow people who are experiencing an intense emotion to connect to other people and get support.

Gilmartin thinks such an app could play a small part in preventing child abuse, financial collapse, and even war. When you boil down addiction, murder, and greed to its base parts, he says, you'll find a hurt person at the bottom of the pot, a person expressing themselves in the only way they can. Destigmatize that person's condition, give them affordable healthcare and a safe place to process, and you're on your way to nipping 90 percent of society's problems in the bud, he believes.

"Our only other problem would be the weather," he said.

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/12/a-podcast-for-your-mental-health/382981/

I still remember the first time someone spoke to me about grit. It wasn’t when I lost my dad and saw my mother fall apart.

It wasn’t when my mother died, and I felt like I was falling apart.

It wasn’t when people who I believed would invest in my business didn’t. It wasn’t when the great recession hit our advertisers and my business had to stop publishing a magazine.

It was when I was thinking of pulling my 3-year-old out of a preschool in which she clearly wasn’t thriving. She was anxious, frozen, a shadow of the child she used to be before she started there.

But it was a co-op preschool, meaning I couldn’t just turn around and leave. When you sign up to join a co-op, you also sign up to work various jobs around the school and to commit to being an active part of a larger community. In other words, I had to talk to the other parents at the co-op about my decision. One of them cautioned me: "What about grit?" she said. For a minute, I was taken aback. Was she talking about me or my 3-year-old?

She wasn’t talking about me.  

It shouldn’t have shocked my system. I’ve often felt like a misfit around parents when they talk about how kids have it too easy these days or how important it is to inculcate a sense of independence in them as early as possible.  

This is the story of my struggle to allow myself to be the kind of parent I want to be. I grew up in India, but moved to the U.S. in my 20s and became a mother here in my 30s. I had never felt like an outsider, ever—until I had a child.  

I read a lot of books so that I would be the best mom I could be. And I suddenly found myself wondering, did the Indian parents I saw in my parents’ generation—and many in mine—get it wrong? My father was a big believer in the importance of a child’s first five years. I often heard him tell people how he couldn’t scold me until I was five. He reprimanded his younger brother for raising his voice at his kids before they turned five. Raised voices or not, we didn’t have any concept of time-outs anywhere around us. I can’t recall a time when I cried and a grown up didn’t come to console or hold me. They always did. I slept with my mother until I was five. My father would tease me and say I was my mother’s tail, but neither of them did anything to get me to sleep alone or in a different room with my siblings.

My parents weren’t the only ones with this kind of approach. The phrase I would hear in almost every home we visited during my childhood was some version of 'Let the kids enjoy themselves.' They have the rest of their lives to be grown up. And the social fabric of our world supported them. We would go to the fanciest of restaurants with our parents and run around and play tag. No one would stop us—not the managers, not the other diners. It was normal. Soon enough, the servers would join in. It was lovely.

I’m not suggesting for a moment that my parents and their friends necessarily had it right. Some of them produced kids who were happy, some of them didn’t; some of them raised CEOs, some of them raised stay-at-home moms. I’m just saying that it’s okay to be an elephant mom, an elephant dad—an elephant parent.

If you’re wondering what 'elephant parent' means, it’s the kind of parent who does the exact opposite of what the tiger mom, the ultra-strict disciplinarian, does. Here’s a short video clip that shows how real elephants parent. And that’s what I’m writing about here—parents who believe that they need to nurture, protect, and encourage their children, especially when they’re still impressionable and very, very young.  

My elephant mom was a doctor with infinite patience. I failed a Hindi test when I was in fifth or sixth grade, and I remember going to her, teary-eyed, with my results—and hearing her tell me that it didn’t matter. There were many more tests ahead. As I sobbed in her lap, she stroked my hair, hugged me, and told me there would be another test, and I could pass that one. (I did get the annual proficiency prize for Hindi a year later at the same school.)

My grandparents were doting parents, too. On both sides, the families lost everything in the partition of India. They had to flee to India from what is now Pakistan. My naana (mother’s father), originally a doctor from a wealthy family, began saving every rupee to educate his girls. He stopped going to the movies, his favorite past time. Both he and his wife stopped buying new clothes and began stitching them at home instead.

My father knew grit. He came to Punjab in India on a train with bullets flying around him—and people dying in front of his eyes. (Riots accompanied the 1947 partition that divided India and Pakistan.)

After his father died suddenly, he looked after his mother and brought up his four siblings in India. He and my mother paid for them to study in school and college and funded their weddings. Yet, my father never talked to me about grit. If anything, my parents protected me from pain; perhaps they knew that life would eventually have some pain in store for me, sooner or later. They learned how to raise their kids from their parents. And I learned how to raise my kid from them.  

But my husband, who is also Indian, and I are raising our daughter thousands of miles away from where we were grew up. There aren’t any families of Indian origin at my daughter’s preschool or even in our immediate neighborhood. "Our way" isn’t a way that everyone around us understands. As a baby, we wouldn’t let her cry to sleep. It wasn’t a judgment on those who followed the sleep expert Marc Weissbluth’s advice. It was and is a cultural belief. Even now, our four-year-old will often ask us to put her shoes on, and feed her, much to the consternation of many fellow parents. But we do it because it connects us to our uncles and aunts who would have said she has the rest of her life to do it herself.

To make sense of the world where I was raising my child, I went to meet Angela Jernigan, who runs Parent Connect East Bay in Berkeley. She helps people find and build a support structure in their parenting journey. "We don’t have the village anymore," she said. "It’s very hard for parents to be connected (to their kids), to give their kids the experience of being felt and heard." For that to happen, parents need to feel connected and supported themselves, which in our fragmented world can be hard to do, she explained.  

Jernigan has heard words like grit and resilience thrown around in her own child’s elementary school. "I explain that us having adult-like standards for children is the wrong way to build resilience. Parents have to be nurturing to build a core of strength with children," she said.

Nurturing. Vulnerable. Empathetic. That’s how parents need to be, she suggests, when kids are having a "big feeling" (in other words, a meltdown).

I heard something similar in a TED talk by Brené Brown, a research professor at the University of Houston’s Graduate College of Social Work, who studies the human connection. "You can’t selectively numb those hard feelings," Brown said. She was referring to emotions like guilt, vulnerability, and shame—emotions kids and adults feel. In an uncertain world, Brown said, we like to make things certain. "We perfect, most dangerously, our children."   

And why we do that probably warrants an entirely different discussion about our cultural fears and insecurities. Have we failed as parents if our kids aren’t the most well-behaved, toughest, and smartest kids in the neighborhood? Jernigan’s clients are more often than not people who are trying to be the perfect parents, raising perfect kids.

Literature, discussions and forums about parenting abound. As we look for the best ways to raise our kids, we gravitate toward what makes sense to us. After meeting Jernigan, I couldn’t help but think that if there were so many parents flocking to her group to learn how to better connect with their kids, maybe many of the differences I’d noticed weren’t as fundamental and deep-rooted as I’d believed. Perhaps parents, regardless of where they’re from, have more in common than not. The mom who spoke to me about grit also, on a separate occasion, spoke to me about wanting a slow separation from her child.

Studies and facts indicate that, regardless of what parents might say about being tough with their kids, they are spending more time and money on them than previous generations have done. A 2012 study by sociologists Sabino Kornrich and Frank Furstenberg that was published in Demography found that parents spent more on their children’s education and care than on consumer goods from 1972 to 2007. Studies out of the University of California at San Diego show that college-educated parents in the U.S. have dramatically increased the time they spend with their kids over the past twenty years.

So what does any of this mean? I suspect that, even though it’s the tiger mom who makes the bestseller list, and everyone’s petrified of looking too soft, maybe everyone around me is a little softer than they think they need to be. I’ve realized that the best parent you can be is the one that you want to be; and there is no perfect parent, just as there is no perfect kid.

The journey that started at my child’s first preschool ended well. I knew I had found the right preschool when a matter-of-fact educator named Janet Bronson, who helps run a small preschool in Berkeley, said to me during a school tour: "What I want to do is make sure that a kid feels emotionally safe here, not just physically safe." And then a teacher named Nyisha Galvez said, "Teach me some words in Hindi so that I can make her feel comfortable and at-home."

My daughter had found her habitat. And perhaps I had, too.

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/12/elephant-mom-timeof-tigermother/383378/

There’s this new thing going around where you’re supposed to google your first name and the word “meme” and post the images that come up.  And I thought, we should totally do this.  I’ll go first…

Aw.  That’s sweet.

Fair enough.

Well, that took a turn.

Okay.  Feeling a little uncomfortable now.

What…what is happening?

No.  Do not like.

Am I supposed to feel like I’m being stalked?  Is that how this is supposed to work?

How did you even get in here?

My name is not even on there.

I get the joke but it still feels weirdly threatening at this point.

Yeah.  I don’t like this anymore.

I want to go home now.

PS.  I also looked up “bloggess meme” and it was much less threatening and took me to thousands of pictures you guys made of Juanita, my taxidermied weasel.  Some of the very best are collected here.  I highly recommend it as a palate cleanser.

Love this 3D Space Cookie Cutter.

(via Joanna’s 2013 Holiday Gift Guide)

Recently, educators and policymakers have shifted more attention and funding to students’ education in science, technology, engineering, and math, known as STEM. Last month, for example, President Obama announced that his Educate to Innovate initiative raised $28 million to train 100,000 STEM teachers by 2021, augmenting the budget of $53 million already awarded for teacher recruitment.

Even people who have haven’t had STEM on their radar have probably seen headlines that reflect the challenges and discrimination faced by some people interested in pursuing these fields. Women in science have gotten a fair amount of attention, and it’s warranted; even though women made up about 45 percent of the overall workforce in 2010, they only accounted for 28 percent of scientists, according to the National Academy of Sciences.

Although there are more women in the workforce now than ever before, women who aim high professionally know that they will likely encounter a tough road. Many encounter discrimination or dissuasion (in STEM and otherwise) and almost all are forced to make hard choices between their jobs and other aspects of life. Since women entered the workforce, they have been subjected to an impossibly high standard of of “having it all”—professional success, well-behaved children, sated spouse, spotless oven. And living up to that expectation can be daunting. Trailblazers like Sheryl Sandberg, the chief operating officer of Facebook, have offered tips for how women can better navigate a male-dominated professional world, yet somehow true equality in the workplace seems to seem only incremental.

This past June, 41-year-old Ana Luz Porzecanski became the director for the Center for Biodiversity and Conservation at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. Originally from Uruguay, she has been working at the center for over a decade, having earned her Ph.D. in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from Columbia University in 2003. In late October, she gave a presentation at a conference called STEMinism: Inspiring Women Scientists for current and future women in STEM. I caught up with her shortly after in her corner office to learn about her career and get a few tips on finding balance as a woman in science. Our conversation has been condensed and lightly edited.

---

Alexandra Ossola: When did you know that you wanted to go into science?

Ana Luz Porzecanski: It wasn’t an easy decision for me because I had a lot of interests. My father is a scientist—he’s an agronomist—and my mother is an architect, but also an amateur paleontologist. So we spent a lot of time outside in nature; my parents were very curious and eager to show me the natural world. I had a lot of concerns about society and societal issues so for a while I thought I might go into sociology rather than biology. But I decided to try biology. And it was very rewarding so I stuck with it. I would say there was a tipping point and a tipping person, as happens many times. I started college in Uruguay and took an evolution course with a researcher professor there named Enrique Lessa. He led the evolution lab at the school of sciences and he was incredibly inspiring and dynamic and fun.  He invited me to a field trip with his lab and—I’ll never forget this—I arrived late on a freezing night and all they had available to eat was cold rice. The field conditions were tough, but the next day the work was so interesting, the team was so much fun to work with, and they had so many interesting thoughts and questions that I got hooked.

Ossola: So you’ve been working in this field for 23 years. If you could go back in time and tell your early career self one thing, what would you tell yourself?

Porzecanski: I would have wanted to be more aware early on that there are a broad diversity of career paths related to science. In the beginning I thought that there was really just research, but now I know that there are a lot of different paths, and I think it’s important for people to know that. Not that I would have done anything different; I think a Ph.D. served me well on many levels.

Ossola: What has been the hardest part of getting here to this point?

Porzecanski: I always say the two hardest things I’ve done in life are: getting my Ph.D. and giving birth to my first daughter—in that order, because the latter was shorter. I think getting a Ph.D. is challenging because you’re really trying to figure out who you are intellectually, what you can do, where your limits are, how not to be too ambitious with what you’re trying to do. And you also have to negotiate a lot of relationships—with your committee members and their expectations, and with your advisors.  It’s just a challenging time for everybody who’s in that process because you are consumed by your project, you think about it all the time. It’s not a job—it’s your mission. It’s all consuming.

Ossola: Is there a point at which you were almost dissuaded from completing your Ph.D.?

Porzecanski: Yes, I think that happens for many people. The Ph.D. is a journey and almost all of it rests on you, so it’s a lot of responsibility. Halfway through my Ph.D. I spent a month and a half in the field with a team of researchers from the American Museum of Natural History in the Central African Republic. We were doing demanding fieldwork, and even though it wasn’t completely related to my Ph.D., it was a great opportunity. I remember one day riding in the back of a van with the wind in my face, thinking, ‘Here I am, halfway through it; this is really challenging for a number of reasons. I’m either going to stick with it or maybe I should stop.’ And I remember thinking I will stick with it. That’s how you do it. I also had a very supportive partner; we got married while I was doing my Ph.D.. They say that’s very helpful and I really do think it is, to have someone there who can support you. And my family was supportive—it makes a big difference when you have a supportive network.

Ossola: Let’s talk about a recent presentation you gave on “STEMinism” in which you spoke about women building successful and enjoyable careers in the sciences. Where did your inspiration for the presentation come from?

Porzecanski: It came from me seeing all this negative press out there [about women in STEM] and saying, gosh, this is really an important conversation but I wonder if it’s going to dissuade women from going into science. If they see all this literature out there about bias, about sexual harassment, about discrimination, they’re going to say, ‘Maybe I shouldn’t even try,’ or, ‘This isn’t going to be pleasant.’ And yet I’ve had such a pleasant career so far. I’m surrounded by many people, especially women, who love what they do and are having a great time. At the American Museum of Natural History, I am surrounded by very successful women in science, in all kinds of roles from administration to research. People aren’t writing articles about that fun part, so let’s talk about that. That was the impetus for the presentation. And basically the whole point was to highlight that your career can be successful and enjoyable. You don’t have to be this martyr to be successful, you can have a great life and enjoy it, too. Not that it’s not highly demanding and not that there won’t be sacrifices, but here’s what I’ve learned and here’s how information can help. So I wanted to give the participants some practical tips.

Ossola: Do you think there has to be a tradeoff in order to have a successful career?

Porzecanski: You have to make choices in life. This is how I see it: You can have it all, just not in the same day—you can have it all over time. You’re not going to leave work every day and say, ‘Today was a perfectly balanced day.’ Sometimes that does happen. But when you look back at your life, the past month, the past three months, the past year, if you feel like you have a good balance of things going, then that’s balance. That’s what it looks like. It’s not at every given moment of your life.

Ossola: So how do you maintain this balance?

Porzecanski: I think you have to make some hard choices sometimes. You have to make some decisions about when you need to miss dinner with the family because you need to spend more time working, and when you need to decide ‘I’m not going to make this deadline because I want to go trick-or-treating with my kids.’ But you get better at making those choices. And I do have to say that like any other experience in life, parenting and motherhood teach you how to make those choices because you have to make choices all the time about other people’s needs, your own needs and priorities. And you get better all the time.

Ossola: At the presentation, there were 33 young girls in the audience. You first told them the bad news, about discrimination and bias, but spent most of your time on the good news, that they are good enough to make it. But of course, not everyone is good enough. When do you know it’s time to quit?

Porzecanski: You have to listen to yourself as you go through life and see where are you humming. When are you buzzing when you’re working, when are you happiest, what are you really good at. And follow that. And then you’ll be great at that; everybody has that thing. It’s not a question of saying you’re not good enough at this. I know I probably wouldn’t be good enough for research on theoretical physics, but I’m not going to try it because I don’t think I would be happy doing that. So learn from your experiences and let them tell you about your strengths. And then you will find the area where you are really good at it.

Ossola: What makes the difference between a woman who goes into STEM and a woman who is dissuaded from pursuing a career in a STEM field?

Porzecanski: One big piece is finding those really inspiring, positive mentors. If you have bad luck at the beginning that may dissuade you, and I think that happens for both men and women. The more aware you are of the challenges you may encounter and the more prepared you are to deal with them, the better.

Ossola: What is the biggest hurdle for women in STEM right now?

Porzecanski: I really think there’s no simple answer to that. Any of these things can happen: an unhelpful (in the best case scenario) mentor, a traumatic experience with a mentor or a colleague, an unsupportive environment, the wrong kind of fit in an endeavor you’ve tried to tackle that then becomes really discouraging because you didn’t do well, discrimination and bias. And then there’s family; if you don’t have a supportive partner, it can become a real issue. Any of those things can add up. But you also have other options. Some women leave STEM finding something they like more, and that’s legitimate. Surround yourself with good supporters, both personally and professionally, and have frank discussions with your life partners about the life you want.

Ossola: How can teachers and parents help prepare girls to make these decisions and preparing themselves?

Porzecanski: Try to make it the expectation that women belong in science. One little thing I’ve done with my two daughters is I picked all female physicians, from the orthodontist to the dentist to the pediatrician. And we don’t talk about it, they just are. So I have a feeling that in the future they might be less prone to assuming a doctor is a male than other people. They also have a scientist mother, so there’s that. But we all have that schema in our head; it happens to everybody. An important piece of information that came up recently is this idea that smarts is something you do and not something you are. Not promoting intelligence as a fixed thing but promoting resourcefulness and love of intellectual challenges as the manifestation of intelligence. Put the emphasis on trying hard; if someone is struggling with a particular math unit it doesn’t mean they’re not cut for math.

Above all, don’t let the bad news dissuade you or others; in my experience, for every bad news case, there’s many more women out there having a blast in science.

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/12/having-it-all-as-a-woman-in-science/383274/

Edward Lucas has a habit of popping up at pivotal moments in European history.

In March 1990, shortly after Lithuania declared independence from the Soviet Union, the Economist editor caught a flight to Vilnius and received the first Lithuanian visa: number 0001, a stamp-sized chink in the Iron Curtain that got him arrested and deported by Soviet authorities.

On Monday, Lucas helped chip away at borders once again. In a ceremony in the Estonian capital of Tallinn, President Toomas Hendrik Ilves, a friend of Lucas's from Ilves's previous career as a journalist, made Lucas Estonia's first e-resident. And just like that, the word "resident" took on new meaning, distilled in the smart card below:

Estonia's very first e-resident card, presented to the Economist's editor Edward Lucas. #eresidency #Estonia pic.twitter.com/CsPJuMzxE9

— Silver Tambur (@SilverTambur) December 1, 2014

To be clear: E-residency is not a path to citizenship; it's not legal residency. It cannot be used as a travel document or a picture ID. Instead, it's a form of supranational digital identity issued, for the first time, by a country. It's the online self, now with a government imprimatur. And it's the latest innovation from a tech-savvy nation that brought you Skype, the world's first digitally signed international agreement, and an intricate national ID system that allows citizens to speedily elect politicians and file taxes online. The Baltic republic is so wired that officials are even contemplating uploading the government's digital infrastructure to the cloud so that it can continue operating if Russia invades Estonia.

Lucas is British and lives in London. He speaks "very basic spoken Estonian" and in the 1990s worked as a journalist in Tallinn, where his oldest son was born. Beyond that, his Estonian identity now consists of an ID card with a microchip for authentication and digital signatures, plus a card reader to help generate those signatures. The card will allow him to do things like sign documents, register a company in Estonia, conduct transactions with an Estonian bank account, and order prescriptions in Estonian pharmacies—all online, and from anywhere in the world. E-residents, in other words, will have access to many digital services that Estonians already enjoy, rather than having to go about these tasks through a more ponderous, paper-based process.

As Lucas sees it, the biggest benefit of Estonian e-residency is "having a digital signature valid anywhere in the EU, or in any other country which uses electronic authentication" (Estonia is an EU member). He can, for example, use his new digital ID to a buy a ticket on a German train. And he can send authenticated emails, including encrypted messages to other cardholders.

"I can identify myself and other people online," he explained by email. "This is one of the biggest weaknesses of the internet. I do not know whether the people who send me e-mails are really those people, or just impersonating them (perhaps even cybercriminals who have broken into an e-mail account). Similarly it is hard for me to prove that I am me. Having a state-issued digital signature means that I can sign an e-mail (and if I wish encrypt it)."

In its embryonic form, at least, the program is a cross between techno-utopian ambition and bureaucratic reality—a theoretically seamless, borderless digital system grafted onto a messy physical world. E-residents will, for example, be able to use their Estonian bank accounts from anywhere they can get Internet, but they'll need to visit those banks in person to open the accounts. Anyone in the world over age 18 can apply for Estonian e-residency, but applicants need to first visit a Police and Border Guard office in Estonia, where they'll submit paperwork, pay a €5o ($62) fee, and provide biometric data (a facial image and fingerprints) for a background check—an attempt to keep criminals and hackers out of the system. Accepted e-residents will be able to pick up their ID cards within two weeks at the same office where they applied.

The point being: If you're interested in becoming an e-resident but don't live in the country or nearby, you might want to start planning that extended Estonian vacation you've always dreamed of. (If I were to leave D.C. for Tallinn tomorrow, and return two weeks later, a round-trip plane ticket would cost me at least $1,300, making that $62 fee seem just a touch steeper.) Siim Sikkut, an information and communications technology advisor in the Estonian government, told me by email that Estonia hopes to move the application process partially online and offer e-residencies at its embassies overseas by the end of 2015.

The population of Estonian e-residents is likely to be small, at least at first. Sikkut said that almost 13,300 people have signed up so far for an email listserv with updates on e-residency, and that Estonia will initially target roughly 40,000-50,000 foreigners who are already involved in the country as, say, students, investors, and businesspeople. Estonian officials have set ambitious goals of eventually attracting millions of e-residents and tens of thousands of companies, drawn to the ease of doing business in Estonia and the European Union. (According to Estonian officials, e-residents will have a similar legal status to foreigners in Estonia, though Estonian law will govern access to the data on ID cards.)

"Many people live in countries where the state does not issue digital IDs, or find their country's system cumbersome or untrustworthy," explained Lucas. "Now they have an alternative. Imagine a world where governments issued credit cards, and you were stuck with whatever your own country's government provided. Estonia is issuing the digital equivalent of the Amex card—you can use it anywhere."

I asked Sikkut what he made of talk that the e-residency scheme could disrupt the nation-state system as we know it.

E-residency "is not meant to be a meaningful innovation in the sense of revolutionizing citizenship," he noted. "We are solving a practical problem for people, allowing them to conduct business and carry out their lives more efficiently (meaning: digitally)."

"I personally think that citizenship will be tied to older territorial constructs for quite some time," Sikkut added. "However, I also think that citizenship is not the most defining feature of us anymore—rather a community feeling is, and each of us can belong to quite a few communities." In the long term, he wrote, the government is interested in exploring how it can make Estonia, a tiny nation of 1.3 million people, "larger in the world than we otherwise would be, as a community of e-Estonians."

In a way, Estonia's e-residency program is making the nation-state more relevant, not less. Lucas, for instance, acknowledged that private companies already sell digital IDs, but expressed concern about "severe shortcomings" in those services. "Estonia's card has the authority of a nation-state behind it," he wrote.

And how will Lucas respond if he's asked tomorrow about his nationality, or where he lives?

"I will still be a proud and loyal British subject," he responded. "But in my life online, where I am not constrained by national boundaries, I will be identifying myself with an Estonian-issued digital ID."

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/12/the-world-has-its-first-e-resident/383277/

It’s a Tiny Cloud. It’s a light. It’s a Bluetooth Speaker. It’s awesome. Also comes in large. #wishlisted

Sometimes, I wish Instagram was a real person so I could shake its hand and give it a huge hug for the endless amounts of inspiration it provides. From discovering great new home tours, photographers and florists to talented DIYers, I am constantly screengrabbing things and sending them to myself to follow up on later. This week’s final DIY project before the holiday is one I’ve been excited to post for weeks. I follow a number of crafters online, but few inspire me as much as Susan Beech. Susan’s Instagram account, A Petal Unfolds, is full of beautiful paper flowers. Most of the time I can’t believe they’re not real, but especially in the case of her rich purple and red ranunculi. They looked so much like the real thing that I wrote to her to ask if we could do a how-to together. Thankfully she was game and today I’m thrilled to share her project, just in time for holiday centerpieces. xo, grace

About Susan: Susan Beech is a paper flower maker living in Brighton, UK. She graduated in Fine Art Printmaking from the University of Brighton in 2002. She focused mainly on digital work and landscape photography, producing emotional pieces on her keen affiliation with nature. In 2013 Susan decided she wanted to go back to making things with her hands again. She took a class in making paper flowers and was instantly drawn to the beauty that could be created from paper. She opened her online shop A Petal Unfolds in April 2014 and is excited to develop her work further.

Click through for the full how-to after the jump!

(more…)

Munchkin the Shih Tzu/Teddy Bear gets some exercise in your new go-to video for whenever you’re feeling sad.

Munchkin the Shih Tzu

The Washington Post has a decent synopsis of what’s happened since the verdict: What We Know About What Happened in Ferguson.

What You Can Do

10 Ways You Can Help the People of Ferguson from the Huffington Post:
• Support efforts requiring all state, county and local police to wear [dashboard and] body cameras.
• Advocate for the removal of the Pentagon’s “1033 Program” by signing the petition here
• Send condolences to Michael Brown’s family here.

A protestor retreats after being treated for tear gas. Photo Credit: Michael B. Thomas/AFP/Getty Images

News

Darren Wilson Describes his Fear of Michael Brown
“Wilson said that Brown went for the officer’s gun, saying: ‘You are too much of a p—- to shoot me.’”

President Obama’s Press Conference
“We need to recognize the situation in Ferguson speaks to broader challenges we still face as a nation. The fact is in too many parts of this country distrust exists between law enforcement and communities of color.”
“We have made enormous progress in race relations over the course of the past several decades. I have witnessed that in my own life, and to deny that progress is to deny America’s capacity for change.”

Photos of Nationwide Protests from Time.

Commentary on violence in Ferguson

2 Timothy 1:7 – For the spirit of God does not make us timid, but gives us power, love, and self-discipline. Photo by: Michael B. Thomas/AFP/Getty Images

Brown Family’s Statement
“Join with us in our campaign to ensure that every police officer working the streets in this country wears a body camera. We respectfully ask that you please keep your protests peaceful.”

Dasha Jones, 19, is arrested for unlawful assembly during a protest outside the Ferguson Police Department in Ferguson, Mo. on the evening of Nov. 20, 2014 from Time Magazine

Impact

‘Ferguson Goddamn‘ from Colorlines:

“I’m frustrated with myself for expecting, if only for a moment, that people who have historically not valued black life, would actually value black life. More than anything, I’m sad. I’m just sad. This is no way to live.” – Dr. Yaba Blay, director or Africana Studies, Drexel University

“Even as I expected the decision to be what it was, it still hurts deeply. Who can be shown their babies’ lives don’t matter and expect to feel anything but pain and rage? And fear? The decision leaves me in fear for the safety of the children I love so deeply.” – Asha Bandele, Author

Satire and Social Commentary

Young man wears a shirt mimicking popular shirts with names of television show characters, but supplanted by names of black children and young men killed through abuse of power. Photo by Time. (If you’d like one, it’s part of the And Counting collection sold here.)

Nation Doesn’t Know If It Can Take Another Bullshit Speech About Healing
Sometimes Unfortunate Things Happen in the Heat of a 400-Year-Old Legacy of Racism

The post The Ferguson Verdict Links appeared first on Mighty Girl.

by Jazmine Hughes

Everything that could've been said has been said; everything that could've been done was avoided. Last night, Michael Brown was put on trial for his own murder. You will hear me repeat this a lot: what age is a black boy when he learns he's scary? Millions learned last night.

Let's focus on the good. Mike Brown was 18 years old, freshly graduated from high school. He was funny, silly, quiet and respectful, a gentle giant. He liked to take selfies. He liked to rap, and there is not a goddamned thing wrong with that. He is gone, but we cannot forget him.

If you are angry, like me, here are some things you can do. First and foremost, always and forever, register to vote. There is no excuse. You can contact your local representatives to implore them to require body cameras on every cop. You can sign petitions like the ACLU's against racial profiling, or Change.org's to protect communities from police violence. You can donate: organizations like Black Lives Matter and Operation Help or Hush are on using social media to garner change, the National Lawyer's Guild is providing legal support to protestors, and the Ferguson library will remain open today even though schools are closed, to provide solace and shelter.

Keep thinking about Michael Brown. Keep thinking about Trayvon Martin, about Oscar Grant and Tamir Rice and Sean Bell, about so many others. Keep thinking about all those little black boys who never made it home, about all the little boys who are afraid to leave. But do more than think: do. "Let's not just make noise," as Brown's family has implored us. "Let's make a difference."

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What is it about the murder-mystery podcast Serial that makes it so gripping? This question has come up in conversations a lot lately, mostly with other journalists who, like me, instantly got hooked on the This American Life spinoff.

Serial is a weekly podcast that revisits the 1999 murder of a Baltimore high schooler and the man who was convicted of killing her. Each week, reporter Sarah Koenig takes listeners with her as she investigates the crime, the court case, and the characters involved in an attempt to sort out what really happened.

The story, it seems, is a whodunnit. The central question: Is Adnan Syed, in fact, guilty of killing Hae Min Lee?

But Serial is also a story about storytelling. Listeners ride along with Koenig each week as she does her investigative work. We hear the reportorial leads that don't pan out. We're privy to (at least some of) her questions and doubts. And from this format another key question emerges: Is it okay to be enthralled by all this? A person was murdered. In real life. And yet Serial's fans—is it weird to call them fans?—gather around the show like it's Twin Peaks.

Episodic television, of course, took its form at least in part from episodic literature—which in turn influenced what's known today as narrative or longform journalism. The serialized novel was one of the defining features of the 19th-century newspaper. Serialized non-fiction, too, has a long tradition in American journalism. Truman Capote's best seller In Cold Blood first appeared as a four-part serial in The New Yorker in 1965. All this is to say that it's not as though Serial is breaking any new ground with regard to format.

"It's just telling a longer story," the show's executive producer Julie Snyder told me. "And so serializing it kind of felt like it was a normal thing unless you wanted a really long 14-hour story or something, you know? You're going to have to break it out into chapters like the way a book would."

And there are many, many books about real-life murders—about the Boston Strangler, and the Craigslist killer, and the murder of two Dartmouth professors, and on and on. Thinking about production, the most experimental aspect of Serial, Snyder told me, wasn't so much the serialization as it was the idea that Koenig didn't know how the series would end when the first episode aired. The podcast team wondered if people would hear the story and offer information that might influence its outcome. But that's not an unusual approach, either. Just like with an "investigative series in the paper, as you are reporting out the story, more people are going to become aware of the story, see what other people are saying, reach out to you," she said.

So why does Serial feel different somehow?

Snyder says the popularity of the show—and the intensity of listeners's obsession with it—surprised her team. There's something disorienting, she says, about the way the conversation about the show feels akin to the kind of discussion you might find on a subreddit about Lost. Maybe the ethical implications of this kind of storytelling are less McLuhanian—they're not so much about the medium being the message—and more about the cultural context that shapes this moment in broadcast. In other words, maybe it has more to do with the show's listeners than it does with its producers.

Serialized nonfiction in the Internet age means that conversations that might have previously happened around the watercooler are now being published themselves. Which means Serial's audience is producing its own stories full of sleuthing, critique, and conspiracy theories. Slate even recaps the podcast the way it recaps Mad Men.

"That part of it is kind of weird," Snyder said. "I feel like maybe I was really naive... I think all of us are a little taken aback and kind of shocked at the little bit of an attention frenzy. It's a small world of podcast listeners but it does feel like, 'Oh my god. This is a lot more intense than I had ever anticipated.'"

What is it, exactly, that people are participating in here? Are Serial listeners in it for the important examination of the criminal justice system? Or are we trawling through a grieving family's pain as a form of entertainment? These are questions much more easily posed than answered.

What's clear is that a big part of what makes Serial stand out is how relentlessly thorough Koenig's reporting is. (So comprehensive that it's the quality she's lampooned for in this parody.) Koenig makes it obvious in her storytelling that reporting the story ethically—and treating people fairly—is a priority. Some of the thrill in following the story is that listeners are given what feels like a window into her reportorial process—including hints at the bits of info she holds back, whether out of fairness or to ratchet up narrative tension: "I'm going to call this man 'Mr. S,'" she explains in one episode. "I don't want to use his full name for reasons I promise will become clear."

"We are trying everything possible to not feel exploitative or, you know, the Nancy Grace type of a titillating thing or 'Let's get ratings off of the death of somebody,'" Snyder told me. "In all of those ways we've tried to do the opposite... Everybody is a real person. Everybody is a three-dimensional person. Hearing people talk, hearing complicated motivations, letting everybody get a full picture."

It might help, I told Snyder, if I knew what the victim's family thought of all this. Has Koenig talked to them? Will listeners ever hear from the parents of the girl who was killed? Do they see journalistic value in questioning the guilt of the man who was convicted? Seven episodes into what Snyder says will likely be a 12-episode season, we still don't know. On the show, Koenig hasn't yet talked about any attempts to reach the family. (A Baltimore Sun reporter who worked with her on one episode wrote last month that "despite extensive efforts... family members could not be found" when he sought them for an interview.)

"We will talk about it on the show," Snyder told me. But she doesn't want to say anything more about it until then. Fair enough. The narrative arc, after all, is up to the storyteller. That's true on the radio, and in newspapers, and in Facebook status updates. Deciding what information to include and when to include it is what makes something a story in the first place; it is one of the defining parts of any journalist's job.

And yet the decision to release the show weekly wasn't part of some narrative grand plan—it was mostly a way to bake deadlines into the production cycle, Snyder says. (It seems worth noting, too, that if Snyder and her team can raise enough money to produce a second season, they plan on serializing a non-crime investigation next.) The weekly production schedule also may be what makes Serial seem somehow edgier than the investigative crime stories we're used to. "In that regard, I did not foresee it at all," she said. "Maybe because that element of narrative tension spread over a week feels so akin to, 'I haven't felt this way since Breaking Bad,'... 'What's going to happen?'"

But just because something is suspenseful doesn't make it unethical. What Serial really reveals is that the ethical questions it raises about crime reporting and the treatment of victims in the media are the ones we should already be asking.

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/11/is-it-wrong-to-be-hooked-on-serial/382500/

A smartly designed retro inspired iPhone charging cable: The weighted knot anchors the cable on any flat surface so it’s always there when you need it.

(via)

This made me laugh.

"I knew I couldn’t call the police because that would frighten him even more, and so the quickest and best solution for everyone involved was to get him inside his house."

Bill Cosby did not want to talk about rape with the Associated Press. That much he made clear in an interview with AP arts reporter Brett Zongker, who interviewed Cosby and his wife, Camille, upon the opening of an exhibit of their collection of African American art at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art. During the November 6 interview, which took place at the museum, Cosby rejected a question from the reporter about the allegations of sexual assault that have lingered over the popular performer—and national father figure—for nearly a decade.

“There’s no response,” Cosby tells Zongker during the filmed interview, which the AP released in its entirety on Wednesday. Seated in front of Henry Ossawa Tanner’s powerful 1894 painting, "The Thankful Poor," Cosby appeals to the reporter after the interview concludes (with the tape still rolling) to omit any discussion of the allegations of sexual assault. When that doesn’t appear to work, Cosby tells someone off camera, “I think you need to get on the phone with his person [Zongker’s employer], immediately.”

Now it’s the Smithsonian that doesn’t want to talk about rape. Through a spokesperson, both the National Museum of African Art and the larger Smithsonian Institution declined to discuss allegations from as many as 15 women that Cosby drugged and raped them. Two women, Joan Tarshis and model Janice Dickinson, have come forward with their accusations since the November 9 opening of “Conversations: African and African American Artworks in Dialogue.” A third woman, Therese Serignese, said yesterday that Cosby drugged and raped her when she was 19.

In a two-sentence statement, the Smithsonian made clear that it is standing behind Cosby, without saying as much. “Conversations” will remain on view through the start of 2016. That’s the end of the conversation from the museum’s perspective. But it should be the start of one. The National Museum of African Art had no business hanging Cosby’s art collection in the first place. But now, with serious questions about Cosby’s past finally coming to light, the Smithsonian must reconsider its own role in framing the one conversation that matters most right now.

“When you choose to launch a show about a collector, rather than a show about art, you’re putting the collector on the pedestal, rather than artists and art and its history,” says art critic Tyler Green, host of the popular Modern Art Notes podcast and blog. Green, an art-world watchdog, has been a vociferous critic of exhibitions like “Conversations,” collector-driven shows in which the focus is the pursuit of artworks, rather than an artist or a theme. “That can go south really fast, and here, it has.”

The individual collector hardly matters, Green says. Collector-driven shows run contrary to the mission of art museums, which serve to tell the history of art and its makers. While there does exist a school of thought that art history in fact is the history of its benefactors—a theory from the 1980s called the New Art History—critics today tend to dismiss this approach. And in practice, shows about collectors tend inevitably toward hagiography.

“Art museums, through their exhibitions or collection galleries, tell a story of accumulation: how artists accumulate knowledge from their cultures or the art around them,” Green says. “Turning the focus to acquisitors rather than artists makes the focus on accumulation a story about shopping.”

The Smithsonian has a record of condescending to viewers with thin collector exhibitions. “Telling Stories: Norman Rockwell from the Collections of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg,” a 2010 show at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, traded on two of Hollywood’s biggest names for a scholarship-free presentation of one of America’s most overexposed artists. It was a blockbuster. The same museum planned an exhibit of Western ephemera from the collection of Tea Party backer Bill Koch, including Western art—like the celebrated nocturne paintings of Frederic Remington—but also non-artworks, like pickaxes and gold nuggets. (The show never panned out.)

Beyond their low nutritional value, there are other reasons to object to collector-driven shows. Collectors stand to see the value of their works rise after a museum exhibition, which is why museums should never entertain collector exhibits unless the collection is promised to the museum, as former Washington Post art critic Blake Gopnik explained by email. But that’s not the real problem with the Cosby show at the Smithsonian, he argues (putting aside, for a moment, the horrific allegations surrounding Cosby).

“How many collectors, buying only over a span of a few decades, have really amassed just the works an exhibition needs to make some significant art-historical point?” Gopnik writes. “In judging any curatorial exercise, I always ask, ‘What mark would this get if a student handed it in as an exhibition proposal in a curatorial studies class?’ A one-collector exhibition (even including some comparative objects from the permanent collection)? That would get a definite D-.”

The timing of this exhibition can't be seen as a coincidence. Cosby has been on a publicity blitz this fall. Bill Cosby 77, an hour-long comedy special, was set to air on Netflix on November 27. (Netflix has since postponed the program, perhaps indefinitely.) A biography, Cosby: His Life and Times, was published in September to mark the 30th anniversary of The Cosby Show. (The book is now taking a drubbing.) Most notably, Cosby was set to reunite with Tom Werner, the producer of The Cosby Show, for a new NBC series. (That series has been cancelled.)

Even TV Land has pulled re-runs of The Cosby Show from its lineup. Only the Smithsonian is providing Cosby any cover. While it’s troubling to think that the National Museum of African Art can be lined up like an appearance on David Letterman—which, incidentally, Cosby cancelled—perhaps removing an art show in the face of controversy merits some debate. After all, it’s hardly the fault of the artworks that their owner is discredited. Removing powerful works by wonderful African American artists like Romare Bearden and Faith Ringgold does a disservice to museumgoers who want to see them.

The Smithsonian has censored an exhibit once in the recent past. In late 2010, Secretary G. Wayne Clough removed an artwork from an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery. A 1987 video called "A Fire in My Belly" by artist David Wojnarowicz, one of the works included in “Hide/Seek”—a groundbreaking exhibition of portraiture by LGBT artists—drew the ire of a conservative activist-journalist employed through Brent Bozell’s Media Research Center. Just as Bozell’s Parents Television Council used to overwhelm the FCC with complaints about indecency on television, the Media Research Center flooded the National Portrait Gallery with hundreds of phone calls and emails, all registering the same ultra-specific complaint: "A Fire in My Belly" was anti-Christmas. (The surreal video artwork featured snippets of ants crawling over a crucifix.)

When then-ascendant GOP leaders John Boehner and Eric Cantor spoke in favor of taking down the queer-art exhibition, Secretary Clough took action: Over the objections of the museum’s then-director Martin Sullivan, Clough had the video removed. It was absolutely the wrong decision, and Clough later earned a (mild) rebuke from an outside panel organized by the Smithsonian’s board of regents. Artworks shouldn’t be removed from exhibitions that have already opened, the panel recommended. (Secretary Clough is retiring at the end of the year.)

In “Conversations,” the artworks are not the issue. (They present a skewed narrative of African American art history, writes Washington Post art critic Philip Kennicott in his review, but never mind.) It’s the show itself that is the problem. It should never have opened. Its origination calls into question the Smithsonian’s ethical standing as a fiercely independent public institution, and not a vehicle for celebrity. Removing “Conversations” would do the museum no harm.

“We’re not talking about a museum of art in Dubuque. We’re talking about the National Museum of African Art, which has a fine collection, and one of the finest collections of its kind in the United States,” Green says. “If it has to take down a show because it’s embarrassing itself, it’s not like they’ll be showing empty walls.”

Supporting “Conversations,” on the hand, invariably means supporting Cosby. But there might be a step short of pulling the exhibition: The Smithsonian could offer to strike the Cosbys’ name from the show. Pull down the Simmie Knox portrait of the couple that makes them look like modern-day Medicis. Scrub the word “Cosby” from the walls. That would show that the leaders of America’s cultural treasury are not willing to, as my colleague Ta-Nehisi Coates puts it, “take one person's word over 15 others.” It would no doubt lead to the show collapsing.

That would be for the best. In the AP video interview with Cosby, the gallery goes to a dark place. What happens in the room is an abuse of the dignity of an art museum. It’s not just Cosby telling Zongker to shut down the conversation, but several people. It’s not just the reporter that this room wants silenced, but by extension the women who have testified about their pain. One man from Cosby’s retinue tells Zongker that another AP reporter accepted Cosby’s refusal to discuss the allegations against him—and so should he. A woman off-screen whom Cosby doesn’t appear to know (he refers to her as “ma’am”) confirms Cosby’s opinion about Zongker’s line of questioning: “I don’t think it has any value, either.”   

“We thought, by the way, because it was AP, that it wouldn’t be necessary to go over that question with you,” Cosby tells Zongker. (The original November 10 story mentions the allegations in the final paragraph of a 1,000-word piece on Cosby’s collection.) “We thought AP had the integrity to not ask,” Cosby adds.

Now it’s the museum’s turn to prove its mettle. Does the Smithsonian have the integrity not to ask? Or does it have the integrity the situation deserves?

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2014/11/why-is-the-smithsonian-standing-behind-bill-cosby/383034/

I recently paid a visit to my sweet friend Helen Jane and was excited to find this book at her house.

(The second book of the “2 Books in 1!” is “Barbie [i can be…] an Actress.” We’ll get to that later.)

Helen Jane has two little girls under the age of six. I have a daughter who is almost two. “This is great!” I said. “Barbie wants to be a computer engineer! And fifty stickers!”

“Yeah, I was really excited at first, too,” Helen Jane said. “Because, like you, I believe in the good of people. But then, like I’m sure you’ve experienced a million times, I was reminded you should never believe in the good of people.”

“Oh, no. Should I read it?”

“You must. Immediately.”

And now you all will, too. Because this is a real book. A book you could buy right now if you wanted to. A book that right now, somewhere, is teaching possibly hundreds of young girls and boys the following:

At breakfast one morning, Barbie is already hard at work on her laptop.

“What are you doing, Barbie?” asks Skipper.

“I’m designing a game that shows kids how computers work,” explains Barbie. “You can make a robot puppy do cute tricks by matching up colored blocks!”

Barbie! That’s awesome. I love how your game is both educational and fun. Bonus points for keeping it cute, because you are so stylish. Please be careful not to drop your breakfast fro-yo on your laptop. I’ve done it, and it’s not so funzies.

Anyway, Internet, get ready to find your thing to be super pissed off about today.

“Your robot puppy is so sweet,” says Skipper. “Can I play your game?”

“I’m only creating the design ideas,” Barbie says, laughing. “I’ll need Steven and Brian’s help to turn it into a real game!”

What the fucking shit, Barbie?

This is where you assume Skipper will be like, “Oh, why do you need boys? We can do it ourselves! Let’s learn and work hard and do things all on our own because a sense of accomplishment and knowledge are powerful weapons for adulthood.”

But no. Nope. Barbie’s just fine ending her work with the “design ideas” and a laugh. She’ll need the boys before she’ll have a “REAL GAME.”

Wait, wait. I need you to know something, and this is hard for me to tell you, because I’m guessing that like Helen Jane and me, you maybe believe in the good of people. You still hope that when we turn the page, there will be something empowering for Barbie and Skipper to experience. That maybe Steven and Brian are… I don’t know, maybe they could still be girls? But, no. It’s about to get even more misogynistic up in here.

Barbie tries to email her design to Steven, but suddenly her screen starts blinking.

“That’s weird!” says Barbie.

Barbie and Skipper try to reboot the computer, but nothing happens.

“Looks like you’ve got a virus, big sister,” says Skipper.

“Luckily, I wear my flash drive on a necklace so that I’ll always remember to back up my work,” replies Barbie.

So, after this page, we–

Hey, where did you go? Oh, I see you. You’re on the floor, face down, having given up. Yeah, we did that, too. Is it because it took two girls to reboot a computer?

I feel bad for every time I made fun of my mother using technology, because right now some mom is having to read this book to her daughter, and after the “weird” blinking screen and reboot, she’s having to describe the computer’s state as: “nothing happens.”

Are you still on the floor because Barbie wears a flash drive around her neck? And that it’s a giant pink heart? At least Skipper’s doing her best to help the situation by pouring her sister some juice. Girls can be so helpful in the kitchen.

“May I borrow your laptop, Skipper?” asks Barbie as she follows her little sister into her bedroom.

“I really should finish my homework assignment. I am writing about a person I admire,” says Skipper.

“I only need it for a minute,” adds Barbie.

“Okay,” says Skipper.

Run, Skipper! Run from the haunted flash drive!

When Barbie puts her flash drive into Skipper’s laptop, the screen starts blinking.

“Oh, no!” says Barbie. “The virus must be on the flash drive!”

“I forgot to back up my homework assignment!” cries Skipper. “And all my music files are lost, too!”

“I’m so sorry, Skipper,” says Barbie. “I have to run off to school now. But I promise to find a way to fix your laptop.”

“You better!” Skipper replies as she playfully hits Barbie with a pillow.

A PILLOW. SKIPPER HITS HER SISTER WITH A PILLOW. PLAYFULLY.

Skipper has just lost her homework, all her music files and her laptop, but all she’s moved to is STATUS: PILLOW FIGHT.

Barbie makes it to computer class just before the bell rings. As soon as class begins, Barbie raises her hand.

“Yes, Barbie?” asks Ms. Smith, the teacher.

“If your computer gets a virus and crashes, how can you retrieve all the files you lost?” asks Barbie.

The fact that Barbie’s comp sci teacher is female almost lets you assume things are about to get less insulting. Don’t fall for it.

“Well, first you remove the hard drive from the crashed computer,” explains Ms. Smith. “And then you hook it up to another computer.”

“But won’t the other computer get the same virus that made your computer crash?” asks Barbie.

“Not if the computer has good security software installed,” says Ms. Smith. “Good security software protects your computer from catching a virus.”

Barbie gets told how to do something, so what do you think she does next? That’s right. Go find some boys to fix her computering!

After class, Barbie meets with Steven and Brian in the library.

“Hi, guys,” says Barbie. “I tried to send you my designs, but I ended up crashing my laptop — and Skipper’s too! I need to get back the lost files and repair both of our laptops.”

“It will go faster if Brian and I help,” offers Steven.

“Great!” says Barbie. “Steven, can you hook Skipper’s hard drive up to the library’s computer?”

“Sure!” says Steven. “The library computer has excellent security software to protect it.”

IT WILL GO FASTER IF BRIAN AND I HELP, offer the men voices. “Step aside, Barbie.” YOU’VE BROKEN ENOUGH, NOW.

From Helen Jane: Steven and Brian are nice guys, I’m sure. But Steven and Brian are also everything frustrating about the tech industry. Steven and Brian represent the tech industry assumption that only men make meaningful contributions. Men fix this, men drive this and men take control to finish this. Steven and Brian don’t value design as much as code. Steven and Brian represent every time I was talked over and interrupted — every time I didn’t post a code solution in a forum because I didn’t want to spend the next 72 years defending it. Steven and Brian make more money than I do for doing the same thing. And at the same time, Steven and Brian are nice guys.

“I’ve got Skipper’s assignment from the hard drive!” exclaims Steven.

“Fantastic!” says Barbie. “And her other files, as well?”

“I’ve got everything,” says Steven. “Now let’s retrieve the files from your hard drive. Both laptops will be good as new in no time!”

High-five, dude. High-fucking-five.

The next morning, Barbie gives her sister a big surprise. Skipper turns on her laptop– and it works!

“My lost assignment!” cries Skipper. “You are just too cool, Barbie! You fixed my computer AND saved my homework!”

Skipper gives Barbie a huge hug.

Barbie not only waits until the next morning to return her sister’s computer, she completely takes all the credit that it’s no longer broken! What an asshole!

At school, Skipper presents her assignment to the class.

“Hi, everybody,” she says. “The person I admire most is Barbie — a great sister and a great computer engineer!”

Everyone is impressed by Skipper’s presentation.

What?! Oh, wait. Didn’t she mostly write this assignment before the crash? Let’s give Skipper a pass. She almost lost enough already this week. Besides, if we upset her we’re likely to get trapped in the middle of one of her combination pillow fight/bikini car washes.

At computer class, Barbie presents the game she designed. Ms. Smith is so impressed that she gives Barbie extra credit!

Barbie’s terrific computer skills have saved the day for both sisters!

“I guess I can be a computer engineer!” says Barbie happily.

THE FUCKING END, PEOPLE.

Despite having ruined her own laptop, her sister’s laptop, and the library’s computers, not to mention Steven and Brian’s afternoon, she takes full credit for her game design– only to get extra credit and decide she’s an awesome computer engineer! “I did it all by myself!”

Flip the book and you can read “Barbie: I can be an Actress,” where Barbie saves the day by filling in for the princess in Skipper’s school production of “Princess and the Pea.” She ad-libs and smiles her way through her lines, and charms the entire audience. Standing ovation, plenty of praise. At no point did she need anybody’s help. She didn’t even need lines! Just standing there being Barbie was enough for everyone in attendance. See, actors? It’s not that hard. Even Barbie can do it.

When you hold the book in your hands to read a story, the opposite book is upside down, facing out. So the final insult to this entire literary disaster is that when you read “Barbie: I Can Be a Computer Engineer,” it appears that you are so fucking dumb, you’re reading “Barbie: I Can Be an Actress” upside down.

Helen Jane and I were so livid after reading this book we spent the first fifteen minutes spitting out syllables and half-sounds. We’d go from outraged to defeated to livid in the span of ten seconds. “I want this thing to start a meme of girls screaming, ‘I don’t need a Brian or a Steven!'”

We knew we had to share this with you, because if we didn’t, we’d be saying it was okay. We couldn’t just roll our eyes at how insulting this book is, how dangerous it is for young minds, how it’s a perfect example of the way women and girls are perceived to “understand” the tech world, and how frustrating it can be when nobody believes this is how we’re treated.

Just about every review we could find on this book had readers equally offended and frustrated.

Oh, and the 50 stickers? I only saw one: “Nerdy is the new Fab!” The others had already been removed by Helen Jane’s small daughters. We can only hope that one of them doesn’t boast, “My other laptop is a boy!”

by Jazmine Hughes

Do you want to have children, and if so, when? How many?

How important is religion to you? Could you survive in household where there are two different, perhaps disparate views on religion?

Are you gonna eat that?

How close will we be to your parents?

OK, well, can I at least have half?

Do you like my friends? Do you expect me to hang out with your friends often?

How will we divide up money? How will we tackle debt? How will we decide what to save?

How important is equality in a marriage?

I just don't understand why you won't give me half—like, I know it's a good sandwich, but can I at least have a BITE?!

If we ever hit a rough patch, would you be willing to partake in couples' therapy?

Oh my god, this has a tomato on it. Why would you let me eat this?!

What will our morning routine be? Our evening routine?

How will we divide household chores?

You're really being super rude right now. Do you need to take a nap?

Are we able to openly talk about our sexual needs and preferences?

Do you see us traveling often?

Where will we spend the holidays?

What the hell is bugging you?

What do you mean, you've been reading my text messages? Those are private! I gave you my passcode six months ago and you held onto it this entire time??

Where do you want to settle down? Where do you want to retire?

How much affection do you require in a given day?

Why don't you trust me?!

Do you like animals? Do you want a pet?

Will we donate to charity?

Do you think it's ok for me to read your text messages behind my back?

Public or private school?

Will we celebrate cultural holidays?

Do you have a plan to care for your parents?

No, I don't really think you are a "uptight insecure sandwich hog." Don't you say things to blow off steam, too?!

Have we been honest with each other about our health histories? Is there anything we should prepare for?

If we were able to live off of one salary, do you think one of us should stay home and raise our family?

When have I ever not shared my sandwich with you?

When have I ever liked tomatoes?!

Would you ever serve in the military?

Are you afraid of getting older?

Do you think that maybe we're not right for each other after all?

Have you ever committed a crime?

What is your political stance?

Do you want to just eat the tomato-y part and I'll eat the rest?

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